Low-wage San Antonio workers get to tell their stories

By Lynn Brezosky :
March 14, 2013
: Updated: March 15, 2013 12:33am

Mary Beth Maxwell, the acting deputy administrator for The U.S. Department of Labor, spoke to low wage workers in San Antonio on Thursday March 14, 2013 as part of a tour on President Obama's proposal to raise the minimum wage.

Photo By Houston Chronicle

Percentage of hourly-paid workers in Texas with earnings at or below the minimum wage:

As a porter in a San Antonio elementary school cafeteria, Elvia Rodriguez spends her work days cleaning lunch tables and hauling out the trash. She took the $7.75-an-hour job about a year ago thinking she'd eventually earn more.

It hasn't happened yet, and the roughly $520 she takes home every two weeks barely cuts it.

“With the minimum that they pay me, I'm just stuck right now,” said Rodriguez, whose husband can't work because of an injury.

When her son, a senior in high school, had an interview with a Houston trade school, there was no money for the trip.

Still, she's paid 50 cents over the nation's hourly minimum of $7.25 an hour, which means many other Texans have it worse than she does.

A report released this week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 452,000 hourly worker in Texas earned the minimum wage or less, more than any other state.

Proportionately, $7.25-an-hour workers made up 7.5 percent of the hourly workforce last year, ranking the state second only to Idaho in percentage of workers earning minimum wage. The national rate was 4.7 percent in 2012.

Workers earning $7.25 or less were more likely to be women — 9.7 percent of women compared with 5.4 percent of men.

The report comes amid President Barack Obama's push to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour, a proposal he made during his State of the Union address.

On Thursday, Rodriguez and other low-wage workers told their stories to Mary Beth Maxwell, a U.S. Labor Department official who has been gathering first-person accounts around the country to buttress the case for higher wages.

The workers who sat down at the Carver Branch Library said the increase, while not much, could allow for fresh vegetables at the dinner table, new shirts for the children, enough to pay the entire water bill, even a first-ever vacation.

“You don't really have the time to go get into lines for food stamps and food kitchens,” Irasema Cavazos, a home care giver, told Maxwell. “You're working and you're trying to survive, and you take time off to get in line for a bread line or whatever. You'd lose the whole day. We don't want handouts. We would like that work to be compensated.”

Maxwell's trip to San Antonio came the same day as a Senate hearing on the minimum wage, the first step toward a bill that would have to pass Congress.

While details still are in the works, she said Obama favors phasing in the increase by 2015 and then indexing the wage to inflation. The administration also is calling for an increase in the minimum wage paid to restaurant and other tipped workers, which currently is $2.13 an hour.

“There is this basic bargain in America that if you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to support yourself,” Maxwell said.

Critics of the proposal say it's an unfair burden on employers that will backfire by forcing layoffs and raising the price of consumer goods and services.

“It's a domino effect,” said Ignacio Alvarez, owner of Lux Bakery, which employs about 20 workers, with more than half working at minimum wage.

“We can't absorb that much cost,” he said. “That, in effect, will add to the cost of the product line, and that has to be moved forward to the client, to the customer.”

Maxwell said accounts from about 20 cities, including San Antonio, will become part of the discussion.

She said studies show that raising the minimum wage allows workers to spend more, which in the end boosts the overall economy.

“That generates economic activity for everybody, and this has been studied by all kinds of economists,” she said. “It's not perfect, but it's in a positive direction.”

“A business owner can only pay what that individual will bring back in revenue to the company,” he said. “If the government demands $10 an hour, and your value to that business owner is only $8 an hour, then you won't have a job.”

“We continue to increase the burden on people to hire. We increase the burden on people to employ people. And what happens then is just simple market forces. You have less jobs when you put more pressure on hiring people.” lbrezosky@express-news.net